"Brigade"? Seriously?

I might be a tad bit late to the game, but what is your opinion on translating "SOS dan" to "SOS Brigade"?

Personally I think it has a military ring to it that the original name definitely doesn't imply. Haruhi and her group are certainly not a subunit of a larger, hierarchical structure like an army or a fire department. Actually they don't fit in particularly well in their high school.

I believe that even an uninspired translation such as "SOS group" would have been better.

Troupe, company, brigade, group, outing, organization, collective, who gives a fuck　how you translate it.

If you actually understand Japanese, you'll understand that the only appropriate translation is 団 and leave it at that.